


Ghost Towns

by sanidine



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Kayfabe Compliant, Limnal Spaces, M/M, POV Second Person, Self-cest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 08:04:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11619396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine/pseuds/sanidine
Summary: Your first thought, Dean Ambrose, is that the man who has just walked into your motel room has somehow stolen your favorite jacket, even though you are still wearing it.Your second thought is that he has also stolen your face.





	Ghost Towns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [APgeeksout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/gifts).



You leave the venue by yourself after RAW, driving into the dark night until the chiming dashboard light reminds you that you need to stop for gas.

There's no reason for you to be wearing your jacket other than the fact that you're too damn stubborn to take it off. It's the burning heart of July, and even after dark it's hot enough that you start to sweat while you're leaning against the car and watching the numbers tick by on the gas pump. In the too-bright lights of the gas station you can see the way that the pavement shivers, the heat that is radiating up from the cracked asphalt in waves.

As the gas pumps you notice that there are a few kids huddled in a tight knot outside the doors of the convenience store. They're staring at you and whispering to each other. Fans, but no fans of yours if the bright Seth Rollins shirts that two of them have on are anything to go by. 

It's late enough by then that it's technically morning. The glaring streetlamps around the gas pumps are thick with flying bugs that keep smacking into the lights, loud enough that you can actually hear them _tap, tap, tap_. When the kids realize that you have noticed them staring, you grin at them and watch their eyes go wide for a second before they scamper through the doors and into the air conditioned embrace of the convenience store.

Fifty more miles down the interstate and you run into road construction. No one is working this late but the road is still closed, neon orange DETOUR signs that lead you up off the exit ramp and down a twisting two lane highway. The woods on either side of the road are deep and dark, even once you flip the brights on, and you try to stay focussed on watching for deer but eventually your attention strays.

You turn off the radio, and the only noise in the car other than the hum of the tires on the pavement and the blowing of the air conditioner are the sounds that your own body makes. Fingers tapping, lungs breathing, heart beating. You feel like you're flying through space with only the sharp yellow lines of the highway to keep you from being lost forever in the vast void between stars. You think that if any aliens were planning to abduct you that now would be a good time. You even unbuckle your seatbelt to make it easier for them to beam you up out of the car. But nothing happens, except that the highway detour reconnects to the interstate.

It's probably for the best, you think, to stop a little earlier than planned for tonight. You think you feel fine, but you've started to notice the shadows creeping into your peripheral vision. Black dogs that exist only in your mind. It's your brain's fucked up way of reminding you that, even though you've made your living putting your body on the line, one of the most dangerous parts of your job is still just putting on the miles.

You've made good time so far, even with the detour. You figure that you can finish the drive to the SmackDown venue in the morning, so you stop in the next town big enough to have a couple of exits off of the interstate and a smattering of fast food joints and chain motels. You pick the worst looking of the motels, a place with a prime view of the interstate and a bunch of cheap cars in the parking lot. It's not anywhere that you've ever been before, but at the same time you have stayed here many, many times.

The sky is black above you when you stand up out of the car. You roll your neck, _snap crackle pop,_ and when you breathe deep you can taste the thunderheads that are gathered up there, blocking out the stars. Ozone, sharp and bright. The night is hot and flat and still but the air is charged.

You register at the motel office, where the woman behind the desk has no idea who you are and probably wouldn't give a fuck even if she did. She only bothers to look at you once, to tell you that you get a discount on the room because the air conditioner is broken. You just shrug, take the room key when she slides it across the counter. It's not like you didn't know that the place is a shithole.

“So, what's the number for room service?” You ask, snapping your gum.

She doesn't even bother to dignify your joke with a response. Fair enough.

The air inside of Room 202 is warm and stuffy, hotter even than the deep night outside, and you can already feel the friendly fuzz of sleep at the edge of your mind. There are a couple of windows that face out to the parking lot, and you slide them open to try and get a little airflow before you flop down on your back on the single queen bed.

Exhaustion settles over you, heavy and comforting. You probably should have taken off your jacket or at least your boots before you laid down, but it's too late now. The person in the room next to yours is watching TV, loud enough that you can hear muffled voices through the thin wall. Some televangelist, by the sound of it, or maybe QVC. You let the white noise of it soothe you until you hear the telltale noise of a motel keycard sliding and a door lock clicking open. Your door lock, clicking open.

Adrenaline floods into your bloodstream and you sit up in a flash, hands curling into fists, ready for anything. Or so you thought. Because your mind is not ready at all to wrap itself around understanding the man who had opened the door and stopped, shocked, as soon as he noticed you sitting on the bed.

Your first thought, Dean Ambrose, is that the man who has just walked into your motel room has somehow stolen your favorite jacket, even though you are still wearing it.

Your second thought is that he has also stolen your face.

Other Dean slips into the room, lets the door click shut softly behind him, and you can see the corner of his mouth twitch in a grin. You feel your own face do the same exact thing. You've heard about stuff like this happening before, so you're actually not too worried now that your mental train is back on the tracks. The two of you regard each other for a second before you both say, almost in unison

“Time slip?”

“Time slip?”

Both of you laugh, and then laugh harder because of it. Other Dean’s voice sounds different than yours. It's confusing for a second before you remember that supposedly people don't ever sound the same to themselves as they do to other people. Something about how the words vibrate in your own skull changes the pitch. You're hearing your own voice, but its coming from somewhere else. Of course it doesn't sound the same.

It doesn't freak you out as much as it probably should. Other Dean doesn't freak out either, and you figure that makes sense. If he’s you then he knows the same things that you do, knows that there is plenty of weird shit out there.

“So if this is a time slip…” Other Dean tosses his big duffle bag up on the bed next to you and asks “When are you from?”

“C'mon, man.” You grin, pushing your hair back out of your face as you watch him shrug out of his own version of your jacket. It's not like you didn't know it looked good on you, but seeing it in person is different than looking in a mirror. “Where's the fun in that?”

“Hah. Yeah, good point.”

You finally get around to unlacing your own boots while you watch Other Dean unzip his suitcase. But you freeze with one boot still hanging off your foot when he finishes opening it. Because now you can see inside and you realize that your future self has the World Heavyweight Championship title hidden in there, the metal of it shining, partially hidden under a balled up blue t-shirt.

“Fuck yeah!” You accidentally kick the loose boot off in your excitement, barely even noticing that it _thumps_ against the wall. It's not like you give a fuck about disturbing the neighbors. “I knew we were gonna be champion some day, damn fuckin right!”

Other Dean pauses for a second, before he sits down on the bed next to you. He takes the title out, holds it across his lap, and seeing yourself next to you with the championship makes your blood run hot. But Other Dean must not be thinking the same thing, because he his brow furrows for a second and he says

“Wait, are you past us? I thought you were future us.”

“What? Why would you think that?”

“You look older than me.”

“Seriously?” You roll your eyes. “You can't fool me, you know that I know that you know how good our eyesight is. It's my eyesight too. You're definitely older than me.”

Other Dean sort of snorts under under his breath. “Whatever.”

“But mostly I know that you're future me on account of the fact that I've never had that -” You reach over and tap one finger against the belt, the point of the W, and ask “- before.”

“Huh.”

“So how do we win it?”

“You win Money in the Bank,” Other Dean says, low, staring down at the belt “And then you cash it in on Seth. Right after he gets the belt from Roman.”

You feel something flare in your heart at that, something vicious and victorious that revels in the fact that some day soon it will have all been worth it. It makes you want to go out in the parking lot and scream in triumph, even though you haven't been triumphant just yet. Your start to bounce your knee up and down, twitching from the pure joyous energy of it, grinning from ear to ear. But then you notice that Other Dean doesn't look half as excited as you feel. Instead he looks distracted, rubbing at the same spot on his chin that you do when you're thinking hard.

“What?” You ask, faltering slightly. Your nose tingles from the ozone on the weak breeze coming in through the windows.

“It's just. I don't think I've ever been here before. And I sure as hell don't remember meeting my future self when I was my past self.”

“Who knows.” You shrug. This hardly seems like the type of thing you'd worry about as champ. “Maybe I'm gonna go get fucked up and black out later and so we forget that this happened.”

“Maybe.” Other Dean turns to look at you, carefully assessing. It's like looking in a mirror and you feel a brief moment of near vertigo, there and gone but disquieting all the same.

“What.” You say, too flat to be a question.

Other Dean doesn't look away, just says

“Alright. I know it's gonna fuck up the fun, but I gotta know. How far in the past are you from anyways? I haven't been getting that trashed for a while now.”

“Yeah, right.” You snort, disbelieving. You never thought you were the type of person to lie to yourself.

“Gotta always keep one eye open with this thing.” Other Dean pats the title on his lap. “S’not like I'm judging you though. You know that I know that we sorta went off the rails after Seth broke up the Shield.”

The air in the room hasn't been particularly humid, not even with the brewing storm outside, but it suddenly feels as thick as water in your lungs. You break out in goose bumps all over your body despite the sweltering heat and you shake your head as a chill runs down your spine.

That's wrong. It's all wrong. Because Seth Rollins didn't break up the Shield.

You did.

\----

The two of you are standing side by side in the tiny motel bathroom, stripped down to your boxers, comparing scars.

“Not a time slip, then.” Other Dean says.

You nod. “Maybe the room is a thin spot in between dimensions or something.”

Other Dean nods along, the movement of his head, the set of his shoulders identical to your own. “Yeah, I bet that's it.”

 _“Parallel_ universes my ass, everyone knows those lines gotta touch at some point.”

The tile is just cool enough under your feet to remind you how hot the rest of your body is - you had shut the door, sealing yourselves off from the rest of the room, but you're starting to regret it. There aren't any windows in the bathroom. No fresh air. You can't taste the storm anymore as you turn so that you're facing your other self instead of the spotty motel mirror. In your peripheral vision you can see your reflection flank you as you reach out to press your fingertips along Other Dean’s collarbone.

“Broke it, once.” You say, and he nods.

“Couple of weeks after dropping out of high school?”

“Got drunk and fell off my buddy’s porch.”

“Yeah,” he says. “That was a bad bump.”

That far back most of your experiences are the same. Not identical, but close. It turns out that Other Dean did an extra hardcore match that you missed out on due to a spectacularly shitty case food poisoning. Other Dean also got caught taking nunchucks across the Canadian border while you never did. Never got caught, that is.

You've established, now, that it is July 2016 for both of you. But no matter how similar you may look, you're not the same person at all.

When Other Dean tells you that his version of the Shield made it all the way to Payback, you are honestly shocked. Because you remember that when you turned Seth and Roman - after Roman speared you at TLC and Seth lost the next night on Raw - you'd snapped. Other Dean must have a much longer fuse than you, because by  the end of December it had all been too much to take.

You hadn't been able to maintain, not with the old familiar feeling of some thing that you loved starting to slip away from you. To slide through your clenching fists like soft silk. Too good for your rough hands to hold. Nothing good could last forever, especially not where you were involved, and you knew it was the truth but the truth was unbearable. So you did what you did, and when you dropped the crowbar behind the shattered announcers table you were safe in your bone deep, unwavering conviction that it was better to destroy what you had than to lose it, to be left behind.

Other Dean never did that.

Instead, Other Dean has a pale scar that curves around the side of his head. It's a little jagged, mostly hidden in his hairline, but he finds it with his fingertips and shows you. Both of you are damp and sweaty from the heat, even with most of your clothes discarded. You reach out and trace your finger down the thin white line, and you notice how Other Dean shivers at the touch.

The Roman in your reality has something similar, you think, on the back of his head. You laid him open pretty good a couple of times before he finally took the United States title from you.

“Seth did that to me.” Other Dean says, bringing you back

You try and pull your hand away from the scar on his head but Other Dean reaches out and grabs your wrist. His touch is an extra layer of heat, searing. Your head swims with it, and you feel drunk even though you know that you are not.

“How?” You ask, blinking. Other Dean’s hand looks so much like your own hand, just with some different scrapes across the knuckles, and -

“He got Kane to hold me down, put my head against a pile of cinderblocks. Then, Seth curb stomped me.”

Your Seth hadn't been able to believe it when you had turned on them. His disbelief had been funny to you, at the time, since you were sure that pretty much everyone had seen it coming. You had worried, even, that your intentions had become too clear and that you wouldn't be able to take Roman and Seth by surprise when you made your move.

Roman had come after you right away in retaliation, ferocious in his pain but not surprised. Yet Seth had thought that there had to be some secret reason for your betrayal. It had taken longer than you would have ever guessed of Seth trying to talk and refusing to fight you and getting his ass kicked for him to finally accept that you were never coming back. That no one had blackmailed or threatened you. That you had made all of your own decisions of your own free will.

Now, though, you wonder. Having heard how things went down for Other Dean, you wonder if your Seth had already been planning his own betrayal. Maybe Seth had just been in shock that you stole to opportunity from him, though you can hardly imagine Seth Rollins as the Authority's golden boy.

Your version of events must be just has hard for Other Dean to wrap his head around. He laughs when you tell him that, in your timeline, Seth actually helped to kick the Authority out of power.

“Seriously?” He asks

“Uh, yeah. About... a week after Shane lost to the Undertaker at Wrestlemania? Yeah. Shane organized a coup. Seth was one of the guys that helped him.” The air in the tiny bathroom is syrup-warm and cloying, sticky in your mouth as you shrug. It's weird, to have to explain it. Everyone saw Shane’s hostile takeover coming, it had been even more obvious than your own brewing betrayal back in the day. “Things’ve been pretty fuckin’ crazy since then.”

“Oh.” Other Dean sort of huffs, the same way that you do when something is funny but not the type of funny that you laugh at. Then he says “We just split the brands. I was first draft to Smackdown.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

It's quiet between the two of you for a while, then. You inhale the still, stale air in the motel bathroom and feel a bead of sweat sliding slowly down between your shoulderblades. You stare at Other Dean. His eyes, and the way that they are blue like your eyes. The way that he is still touching you even now that he knows the things that you have done.

You could pull your arm back, if you really wanted to. But you don't. Instead you step even closer to this other version of yourself, close enough that you can feel him breathing, and you're almost whispering when you say “You never asked me why. Why I did it, I mean. Betrayed the Shield.”

“I knew what you meant.” Other Dean tightens his grip around your wrist. Not hurting, just firm, and this time it's your turn to shiver.

You flex your hand, open and closed, and you can feel the way your muscles and tendons move under his grip.This close you can see all of your freckles on his face, a more perfect reflection than any mirror, your eyes looking back at you from this face that is not your face. You got hard at some point without realizing it, but you definitely notice it now.

“And I don't have to ask.” Other Dean continues, low. He laughs, a hard thing that sounds like it hurts, like it tears at his throat on the way out. “I know why you did it. Because I fuckin’ thought about doing it too. But I kept telling myself that what we had together meant something. That what we had with the Shield was good, even when we started losing. I kept telling myself that the three of us were brothers, that they were. Family, and I couldn't be the one to -”

Something heated flares in you, then. You twist your arm to knock his hand away and you're not whispering anymore when you cut him off.

“Don't get fuckin’ high and mighty with me. I know you - I fucking _am_ you. So what if you weren't the one to break up your Shield? You just got fucked over ‘cause you didn't make the first move. The Shield got destroyed anyways. Family? Don't give me that bullshit, we don't deserve to have a family.”

Your voice cracks, and you feel something deep inside of you crack open with it. You laugh, a hard thing that hurts as it tears your throat to shreds on the way out, and your heartbeat is wild in your head. Other Dean is just looking at you, hand hovering empty where he had been holding your wrist. He looks like he wants to say something. But he doesn't get the chance, because you move first.

Other Dean doesn't kiss like you do.

You should have expected it, but you're still surprised at the first few moments of awkwardness - teeth clacking together, noses nudging awkwardly. The uncertainty only lasts for a couple of seconds, though, until you breathe into his mouth and he tilts his head and everything clicks together, locks into place, and maybe you should feel weird about all of this but you really couldn't care less. You take your comfort where you can get it, usually in the safety of your own self, and this is sort of the same, maybe, except for how it is completely different.

Other Dean’s hand cups the side of your neck, his thumb firm against the underside of your jaw as the two of you break apart when he slots a leg between your own. You take a half step back until you bump against the wall - the light switch digs into your spine as the press of your body flips off, the sudden dark startling you both. You laugh as you hook a heel around the back of one of Other Dean’s calves to pull him after you. He overbalances a little but doesn't seem to care about catching himself, and the slow crash of you bodies together boils your already overheated blood.

It's not so dark that you can't see Other Dean’s face now that the two of you are eye to eye again, slivers of yellow light cutting in around the doorframe, and this is usually where you would say something. You're usually a talker, in the ring and in bed. But there’s no sound louder than your own rough breathing as you and Other Dean press closer still and regard one another in that moment. And you know that you don't need to say anything at all, because -

Because the truth at the core of your heart is that you've never been able to love someone unless you hate them too. You don't know how to be any other way. You don't know how to be someone better than who you are, but at least it means that loving yourself has never been a problem. And you can know, even without knowing, that despite all your differences this Other Dean is the same.

You grin at him and he presses his fingertips in a little bit harder against the thin skin of your throat and your breath shakes out of you. You're burning hot all over as you shift your bodies together and find what works, incandescent in every place where the two of you are touching. White hot and glowing in the darkness.


End file.
